I heard on the news today that President Obama intends to donate it to charity, but he hasn’t picked which one yet.

Is it just me, or does that seem like narcissism to you? I can’t help but feel that, were President Bush to win such an honor — and to be told about it months in advance — he’d announce the name of the charity immediately. The charity would then get some much-deserved (in the donor’s opinion) time in the spotlight, which is another free gift. It would also emphasize that this isn’t all about him.

I don’t think our current President thinks that way.

As to why he keeps doing this: I still think President Obama has rarely, if ever, had to pay a price for insulting someone… and so he insults his friends freely, convinced that he can always win them back with a smile and a handshake.

How many people, worldwide, can now claim to have been snubbed by Barack Obama? You can start here with the “bitter clingers to guns and religion” in the United States, then add in the entire nations of Great Britain, Israel, Honduras, Poland, and now Norway.

Obama’s minions believe in international law and international consensus. If we reach a point where half the world doesn’t like him, will liberals consider that reason enough to impeach him? Just wondering.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

I blah blah blah blah blah… I blah blah blah… I blah blah blah blah… blah blah blah me… etc., etc.

Dear Gringo: FYI the Cubs play at Wrigley Field and not at Comensky Park (reference Point 9).

Bob, what I wrote, I wrote quite deliberately. Last summer, in an interview with Bob Costas about Obama’s being a White Sox fan, Obama referred “what used to be Cominskey Field” as the place where the White Sox play. He got two out of threee right. He was correct about the name change: it is now U.S. Cellular Field .When Obama referred to Cominsky/Kaminsky instead of Comiskey, he was speaking in the Chicago vernacular. However, were you to poll US males, not just in Chicago, my guess would be that 90-95% of them would state that Wrigely Field was the home of the Cubs, and that Comiskey Park referred to the White Sox.(I myself was hazy about the name change.)
For someone who spent 20 years in Chicago to refer to the home of the White Sox as a Field instead of a Park, states that person is rather out of touch with Chicago culture, not to mention the US mainstream culture. This was an attempt on Obama’s part to portray himself as one of the guys, a typical Chicagoan, a typical American, and he came off rather badly. He got two out of three, but not the trifecta. He can’t quite get all the cultural cues right.

Makes you think that he might have talked about attending some Red Sox games when he went to Harvard Law, at Finley Park or Fenway Field.

I made a double dig by referring to a Cubs game. Who plays in December? Da Bears.

What could he do? Nothing!

Not to mention Jimmy Carter and Al Gore.

To quote the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committtee, they should “think of this as a kick in the leg.”

Huxley :

I read Obama as a deeply wounded individual who is about the last person who should be POTUS.

Years ago a childhood friend talked to me about the perils of interracial adoption. My friend works in high-level management, knows enough about social work and such to write 500 page manuals, and is black.

The friend brought up an example of a black adopted by white professionals, whom the friend knew when both were children- in an attempt to give the adoptee “black experience” as a child- who ended up in prison. Reason: difficulty in navigating self-identity as a minority when raised by majority members. Being raised by whites, in a lily-white town, he self-identified as white, and had difficulty when on his own in a society which considered him black.

I related the story of friends of my parents who adopted a child from Asia when they worked there. We saw each other every year. As a child the adoptee was of sunny disposition. Raised in a prosperous suburb, there was no distinction placed on the adoptee from being white/Asian. When the family moved temporarily to California, the adoptee was placed in a situation where long term socialization was expected to segregate itself along racial lines:” Go hang out with the Asians.” This was a message the adoptee had never heard before. Sunny disposition no more, and years of therapy had no effect. Years later, long returned from California, the adoptee committed suicide, unintentionally taking down the one remaining parent.

After hearing this story, my friend told me, “After you started the story, I knew it was going to end up badly.”

The parents who adopted interracially were loving and attentive. That wasn’t the issue. Minority identity being raised by majority parents, and navigating the issues of self-identity, was the issue. BTW, when I worked in Trinidad, I had direct experience in realizing that being a racial minority in a majority society IS an issue: as a Trinidadian MBA student at USC sitting next to me on my flight out of Trinidad stated, “the shoe is on the other foot.” Given what society is, Obama made the correct decision to self-identify as black.

Given those horror stories about interracial adoption, it is a miracle that Obama ended up as well as he did. Granted, being the child of an interracial couple, and being raised by white grandparents and an Asian stepfather in addition to one’s white parent isn’t exactly the same situation as what is related above. But there are similarities, and for a variety of reasons, wounded he is.